Tradeskill Advice

about: I wrote this mod for 1 function; it finds the cheapest recipe to skill up for a particular tradeskill at some skill point. This makes use of auctioneer advanced and HEAVILY uses tradeskillinfo. (As you can see I pretty much ripped out the entire ui, I’m horrible at ui programming) This also makes use of my skillup rate formula which I approximated after gathering some data, rate = (current skill-grey) / (yellow-grey)

Notice, Tradeskill Info is available at http://www.wowace.com/addons/tradeskill-info/ (its working with version R: v2.2.10 in case you have issues)

Why write/use this?
My primary purpose was to use up to date pricing information from auctioneer to tell you what the cheapest per skillup item you can make is. Why not use guides such as that forum post in the main wow forums? Because it isn’t always up to date. A great example of this is enchanting 291-300. They say to make enchant cloak superior defense, using 8 illusion dusts. My mod says make enchant shield superior stamina for 10 dream dust. On my server illusion dust is 3 gold 50 silver a piece, making this 28 gold a combine. The dream dust however is only 90 silver a piece making it 9 gold a combine. Even at 300 the skillup rate is approximated to be 62.5%, it would take 30% or less to make it more expensive to do the shield enchant, saving you a rather large portion of money.

This mod will occasionally recommend you make some obscure belt using a rare pelt or something instead of standard leather…the reason is auctioneer saw 2 of those pelts for very cheap and thousands of normal leather at a relatively high price. It is technically cheaper to craft. Why not just use the common leather? Well let’s throw out a kind of garbage situation…. You have 10000 rugged hide, they go for 1000 gold a piece, there’s plenty of frost saber hides for sale, for 1 copper a piece… it doesn’t matter if you could already skill up as far as you wanted, you would technically make more money selling the rugged leather and buying the frost saber hides.

I wrote the skillup version to assume you achieve no profit(beyond selling to merchant), lets face it, no one is going to buy your 40 rough bronze leggings even if they do somehow sell a few pieces for double what it costs to make.

How to use:
/tsa shows options
/tsa menu opens the ui
Before you start, make sure you have at least one auction addon scan and most components/items made are known in the local cache. It WILL assume something not in cache is too expensive to make
First select your trade skill (I tried to have it default to your highest non 450 skill)
Then type your point ranges (doesn’t affect gather time, just display length) and check if you only want to use known recipes
Click gather data
Click a plus sign on an item
Click the skill point of interest (ie 134)
On the right side will pop up details showing components, and alternatives for that skill
Clicking a component will “ban” it, so if you don’t want to farm strangle kelp or its way too expensive, then click that
Clicking an alternative or the item itself will ban that recipe (the current recipe is always the top one)
In both ban attempts a confirmation box will pop up, if you want it to take effect you have to click get data again.
Mouseing over an alternative pops up the item tool tip…. Names were just too long to display a list and all that pricing information

Options are stored in the standard add-on interface option list. Here you can reset ignored recipes, components, set your pessimism factor, your fudge factor, and whether or not to dig subcomponents (downright required for engineering)

The little blowhorn/speaker icon pulls up a window to report your results to guild say or whisper, its limited to around 14 lines so you may have to report in batches… this part is hardcoded so you need to do multiple scans for multiple ranges if you must absolutely give the entire path to someone

The number fields are as follows:
Left pane(for the ranged list) has skill level range, average price per skill up, total price for the skill level range, and expected combine count
Left pane(for each individual skill) has the skill, the cost per skill up for that skill point, the skill up rate (1=100%) and the expected combines to get a skill up
Right pane has the item id, the skill up rate, the cost/combine, the cost/skill up, and how much more it costs you to make that alternative compared to the cheapest option.

Features:
-coroutine slightly slows down the gather data function to keep your wow from lagging too horribly or getting disconnected
-Pessimism factors for yellow and green recipes if you don’t trust either your luck or my formula.
-Drills down through subcombines to figure what is cheaper, buying the component outright or having it crafted.
-fudge factor to keep using the same recipe a little longer (very useful for JC) this is to keep 2 recipes to chase each other in almost the same price back and forth (8 vs. 8.01 then 8.03 vs. 8.02 then 8.04 vs. 8.05 over and over) to keep the changing back and forth between recipes to a minimal
-ignores recipes with cool downs, such as transmutes unless it’s the only option available (hard coded, may be wrong, feel free to send corrections)
-is aware of multi skillup recipes for orange items. (also hard coded and may be wrong, send corrections)

Known issues:
-number values in the options don’t show, they’re there just don’t display
-the interface is still ugly, especially the number legend. If anyone wants to fix anything feel free to post code suggestions
-auction addons order used are hardcoded but I built it in a way to use “current scan lowest buyout” ones first
-report feature does not allow for chat channels or raid, temporarily disabled to keep spam lower
-does not take into account the guild perk working overtime which DRASTICALLY improves green skillup rates.

1.2.6 mostly fixed scroll bars, REJOICE! also added "total cost to skillup" feature, added extra info to tooltip when mousing over the detailed information on the right side, saying which subcomponents to craft, buy from vendor, or buy from auction house
1.2.5 updated for MoP, several recipe cooldowns are probably wrong. many tradeskills within tradeskill info are still wrong(ghost iron bolts, LOTS of orange/yellow/gray numbers). did my best to gather mop based multiskillup and cooldown info. send a message with corrections about multiskillups or cooldowns to me. all other recipe corrections go to tradeskillinfo. note many auction addons have 'died' so only TSM, auctioneer and auctionlite were tested
1.2.4 added support for TradeSkillMaster, slightly improved scroll bar spacing in ui
1.2.3 updated min/max limits to 524 for cata, added multi-skillup support
1.2.2 cleaned/fixed some flaws/glitches in ui (still cant properly scrollframe to exact sizes when multiple buttons are different sizes) and yay tradeskillinfo updated
1.2.1 fixed for 4.0.1, still awaiting tradeskillinfo itself to update
1.2 overhaul of the data gather engine (stolen coroutine code from auctioneer), no longer freezes wow for several seconds, added auctionlite auctionmaster and auctionator to price grabbing function. added ability to broadcast your findings to guild say and whisper (kinda stole this from recount) fixed all recipy pasting abilities, try shift clicking things!
1.1.1 minor fixes
1.1 completly revamped to have a ui
1.0.1c corrected what i broke, added skillup data to standalone file for less work for end user.
1.0.1b fixed missing function, made zip include folder

I am not sure if I will use it, because I almost always farm the items I need for my professions by myself, but this is an absolutely wonderful idea!

Will it work with non enGB/enUS clients? I see that you use item ID, so I guess it will?

Thumbs up!

i never work with names always id's assuming tradeskillinfo is localized then any names it does give will be corrent. this also has a potential use for those who farm a lot (say oh fel iron and adamantium) they could then sell the higher cost components (adamantium/motes of fire) and buy the cheaper ones for whatever recipy (eternium) ^_^

Originally posted by zarnyeq2 i never work with names always id's assuming tradeskillinfo is localized then any names it does give will be corrent. this also has a potential use for those who farm a lot (say oh fel iron and adamantium) they could then sell the higher cost components (adamantium/motes of fire) and buy the cheaper ones for whatever recipy (eternium) ^_^

Grrreat! Thank you, I'll try it as soon as i can get my wow running again ;-)

il work on adding more support as people ask for it, for prices i need to be able to preferably ask by id but asking by link workes too. for the info i need recipies subcomponents theyre sources and the skills they are orange/yellow ect at. any more addons it should support?

Originally posted by Tweeker Since this is dependant on an addon called TradeSkillInfo.. do you know where i can get that?

The one here is dated for 2008

I added the tradeskillinfo file from 2008, and this does not work at all, following exact instructions.

nice concept, wish it worked.

i wasnt aware that tradeskill info was basically abandoned, i cant find any replacements that have anything close to the information this mod used, heres the link to the version thats most up to date (its from curse, wowinterface is back around burning crusade release)

and as for supporting other auction mods... tradeskillinfo itself relies on auctioneer i would have to "borrow" even more code to add other options. i did find a few minor bugs (bop components, digging subcomponents not working) im posting the update to fix that...

anyone have any feature/change requests? i have an idea of adding a button to your current trade window to easily select the recipy you should craft "now" (i would need to know what mods besides skillit and advanced tradeskill window people might use)

and as a side note, beta has multi skillups for recipies implimented but they only take effect for orange recipies, making the recomend now button i intend to impliment use it easily, otherwise some addon will have to store that new information (ie TSI)

and i have not gone through the effort of recording the data for the guild perk of "increases skillup rate by 10%" to figure out exactly how thats implimented but i will do it soon (for example it could be at green when it passes 50% rate its really 60% for an ok boost, or its a second roll of 10% if you first fail, making nearly finished greens really good boost, or it could make a 25% skillup rate really 27.5 which is just horribly useless for greens)

ya im suprised i forgot to put that in the description, it supports Auc-Advanced, Auctionator, AuctionMaster, and AuctionLite. atm it doesnt even involve either skillit or the default window, this would only be for the "recomend now" button